Monthly Archives: June 2013

I’ve been doing a bit of late-Spring cleaning around the site—poke around for awhile, see if you don’t find some­thing new.

The reason this tidying-up comes about so late is that I’ve been feeling a bit unset­tled. Not in a bad way, just peri­patetic, and for me, trav­el­ing does not condone any kind of web-work. I’m the sort of person who needs to have every stray file on the desktop accounted for, every imple­ment on the actual desk set straight, before I sit down to do any Real Work. For this reason, the month of May was lost to any compos­ing, and I’m now scram­bling to make up for lost time.

The defi­n­i­tion of Real Work seems to shift, too; it means the thing which I am not working on at the very moment, so while prac­tic­ing, it is writing, and vice versa.

I’m writing a set of “work songs” at the moment, for three singers, all of whom are also composers and friends. The text on my screen right now is a poem called “To Whom it May Concern” by Andrea Cohen, which I think is just about the clever­est thing anyone’s ever set down on paper.

Here is some­thing else stress­ful. I haven’t worked a lot with preex­ist­ing text—haven’t written much vocal music, period—and there­fore don’t have much expe­ri­ence tracking down the permis­sions to set texts. The whole things is quite myste­ri­ous, and it’s differ­ent for every­thing; some­times you ask the author directly, and some­times they are lovely and friendly and say Yes, of course; some­times you ask an agent; some­times you ask a “rights manage­ment company”, whatever that is; some­times they want a comi­cally small amount of money, other times comi­cally large. Some­times it’s dead silence. And of course, once you get around to asking for permis­sion to use a text, it means you’ve already got your heart set on it, in which case a “No” feels like a Major Artistic Setback.

I don’t have air condi­tion­ing in my new apart­ment, but I do have the next best thing, which is two of these.

I am inde­cently proud to announce the exis­tence of my second album, which is called Home Stretch. The disc is a product of three years of work, for which I am heavily indebted to Andrew Cyr and the Metrop­o­lis Ensemble, stellar & stalwart collab­o­ra­tors through it all. It will be released by our friends at Nonesuch.

Home Stretch is also the name of the first piece on the album, a concerto for piano & chamber orches­tra which I wrote in 2008. It’s joined by two pieces which are, in fact, not totally by me: a “re-compo­si­tion” of Mozart’s Coro­na­tion concerto (K. 537) and a Para­phrase on Themes of Brian Eno. An excel­lent liner note by Daniel Stephen Johnson explains the connec­tions these rather… differ­ent-sounding things.

The cover photo is by the great William Eggle­ston. Thanks to the Eggle­ston people for letting us use it. The album itself is designed by John Gall.

When will I be able to buy it, I hear you asking yourself? July 30th is the answer. There will also be some sort of Event. More soon.